Education to all is considered right in most countries of the world. India alone has around 210 million students studying in 1.4 million schools that provide employment to 7 million people making the education system of India to be the largest in the world. However, dearth of skilled teachers remains a major hindrance to the spread of education, especially in the remote areas of rural India and many other countries.
A lot of focus has been given to improve the education system around the world for example; free online content is made available on internet. Video-conferencing platforms like the Skype and other internet based messengers are also utilized for imparting education in the remote areas. However, such means are rarely utilized by a broader cross-section of population due to the lack of the required infrastructure or expertise. Moreover, the lack of familiarity with the language (English) and the western accent further adds on to the problem in utilizing such means of education.
Government initiatives like “Gyan Darshan” an initiative by Government of India, which is a school education TV channel, is purposed to be 24×7 so that the students may receive the lectures in local languages and via a television set which is readily available. However, even such an approach has a flaw, as the students cannot seek any clarification for any of their doubts relating to the lectures available on the channel.
Application No. US20040248074 proposes a system to provide educational service to a user via network. The main objective of this application is to provide the learning material to the user based on their level of understanding through a test prior to sending the learning material. Further, it discusses about changing the content dynamically based on evaluation during learning process. The proposed system also maintains a pool of supporting members, where one of them is chosen to solve user request based on the field of specialization. The support member may also set their status to indicate their availability to solve user requests and the system selects only from the available members. However, the system described therein is unable to handle a large number of user requests for support and it becomes difficult for any support member to solve the given problems.
US20070020603 describes a system for synchronous communication for distance education using TV. The proposed system provides an interface to the facilitator to deliver lectures, receive requests from students, compose replies and send the composed data over satellite to be viewed by the students. The synchronous interaction has inherent limitation on the number of students a single facilitator can handle at a time. Also, the system requires at least one mobile device one per student, adding to the overall system cost that the students from remote areas may not be able to afford.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,793,813 titled Computer Based Education System describes a system that contains a central computer that serves as the source of learning material, and several terminal machines as user terminals. The learning material is sent over a satellite link from central computer to the computer terminal machines and allows user requests over the telephone line. However, such a system assumes the student station to be a computer terminal and a keyboard-mouse interface that may not be available to students in remote rural areas. Further, the system aims for efficient (high bandwidth) synchronous communication, an infrastructure that may not be commonly available in rural areas of developing nations.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,074,216 titled Intelligent Interactive Broadcast Education, teaches a synchronous mode of delivering lectures that are broadcast from a studio to computer based terminals and the interaction between students and instructor is carried out via internet wherein the questions are in the form of text. This method has an inherent problem as it cannot be applied to questions that are captured in audio or other multimedia format.
The solutions provided by the existing art are inefficient in providing distance education to students in remote rural areas especially in developing countries. Due to the lack of expert teachers locally and unavailability of sophisticated infrastructure a need arises to scale up the offline availability of expert teachers that may contribute towards the education of students based in remote areas.
In order to solve the above mentioned problems, the current invention proposes a system and underlying method for enabling an expert teacher for creating and distributing audio-visual lectures to students located in areas geographically separated from the location of the expert teacher. For example, an expert teacher located in a city and a group of students located in a remote rural area. The present invention will enable and motivate a larger cross-section of educationists to participate in rural education with an improved efficiency and extended outreach. The present invention is also able to effectively serve a large number of queries by a geographically distributed massive student population through asynchronous interaction. The system and method described below blends the benefits of Direct-To-Home (DTH) and Internet technologies to achieve a large footprint together with interactivity with remotely located teachers at low cost.
Other features and advantages of the present invention will be explained in the following description of the invention having reference to the appended drawings.